The photo imaging aspects of personal computer (PC) market is growing. Digital cameras allow for digital image capture. These images are then downloaded from the camera to the PC for processing and printing. The increase in PC processing power is enabling even richer image content to be processed, namely video data. Due to the large size of video data files, video data exceeds the capacity of floppy drives, including large capacity drives such as a ZIP drive, and will quickly fill up hard drives. Thus, there is a strong need for off-line storage, such as CD-RW and DVD media.
Additionally, tens of millions of video cameras have been sold that have recorded millions of hours of video data. This data is stored on magnetic media which degrades over time. The life of a tape is much less than the life span of a person. A tape a person makes of their children when the children are small will probably not be usable when the children are retired. The shelf life of tapes varies greatly with environmental conditions. Typically, tape life is substantially less than the life of optical media like CD, CD-RW, and DVD. Therefore, there is a strong need to preserve data for a longer period of time.
Current computer systems use a video capture unit to convert a video stream into digital video stored on the hard drive. Connection to the PC is through a computer interface such as parallel PCI or SCSI and may be internally or externally mounted. A separate software program controls the capture and compression of video. Currently used compression formats typically include MPEG-1, MPEG-2, AVI, or MJPEG. Another software program would then be used to manipulate or edit the video data once the data is on the hard drive. Editing could include the addition of movie effects such as titling, overlays and transition effects. Yet another software program would then be used to store the video data onto another storage mechanism such as a DVD, tape or CD-RW disc.
One problem with the current technology is installation. Installing the video capture unit and the various software programs is time consuming and tedious. Moreover, the different elements may not be compatible with the host computer system or each other. For example, the video capture unit may not operate with the host computer system because the parallel port of the system does not conform to the standards required by the video capture unit. These challenges are beyond the scope of many video camera users to solve. Also existing host system hardware and software components may interfere with the operation of the video capture unit and video software programs, e.g. the system sound card may inject noise into the video audio signal as the signal is transferred through the parallel port via the video capture unit. These challenges are beyond the scope of many video camera users to solve.
Another problem is that the video capture unit does not index the converted data stream. In other words, the video capture unit does not mark scene transitions, e.g. the transition from a vacation verse video segment to a birthday party video segment. The capture unit merely converts the data stream into a digital stream. Thus, for a user to locate a particular video segment in the stream is difficult and time consuming, as the entire video stream must be linearly reviewed by the user.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a video data transfer mechanism with automatic indexing that is simple to use, does not require a PC, and allows easier post-processing of video data on most computer systems.